Build size increase 7x after upgrading nuxt from 3.5.3 to 3.11.2

[fareed13]

Build size increase 7x after upgrading nuxt from 3.5.3 to 3.11.2

[danielroe]

A minimal reproduction won't share any data of your client. But it is needed. 🙏

[github-actions]

Would you be able to provide a reproduction? 🙏

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[HummingMind]

Have you looked at the bundle to see what increased?

npx nuxi analyze

[danielroe]

For a build size to increase from 106Mb -> 760Mb I would very much hope that it's not JS but perhaps other kinds of assets. But bundle size is a good first step! And then likely investigating the outputs in more detail to see what is different.

[fareed13]

I can't provide you the reproduction right now, I can look into making a minimal reproduction. However, I didnt change anything except for the version and dependencies updates as a I have shared already.

npx nuxi analyze of 3.5.3

npx nuxi analyze of 3.11.2

[danielroe]

Based on those screenshots, there doesn't seem to be much difference between your js bundles. It is likely assets, such as video files, that make the difference.

I'll look forward to your reproduction.

[muhammad-grayphite]

Hello @danielroe,

I am also working on this project as a lead resource. It's a large project, and since it's the client's private repository, I'm unsure if providing a reproduction or minimal reproduction is a good idea. However, I will see what we can do.

This build is from the same site at the same time from the database, so there is no difference in assets. The increase in build size might be due to third-party libraries we are using, such as Vuetify, which we registered differently this time in nuxt.config. We need guidance on what could have caused the approximate 7x increase in build size, especially since there were no significant changes.

• Same site (same data from db not a single text difference)
• same dependencies but updated versions

[fareed13]

Hi @danielroe,

I have encountered a significant difference in build sizes between Nuxt versions 3.5.3 and 3.12.2. To illustrate, I created minimal reproduction repositories with the same code:

Nuxt 3.5.3
Nuxt 3.12.2

When generating the build for both versions with just the home page (/) and a blog page (/blog), I observed the following build sizes:

Nuxt 3.5.3: approximately 13.2MB
Nuxt 3.12.2: approximately 39.5MB
The build size for version 3.12.2 is almost 3 times larger than that of 3.5.3. Given that this minimal reproduction is just a small fraction of the full code, the size discrepancy would likely increase further with additional pages.

Could you please investigate the cause of this large increase in build size? If you need any further information or assistance from my side, feel free to ask.

Thank you

[danielroe]

These projects are not the same. They have different sets of dependencies, and lots of different version differences other than the Nuxt changes. They are also not minimal reproductions.

I would advise you change only one thing at a time. For example, upgrade everything but Nuxt, and see if the size changes. I appreciate that might be time consuming but it often helps with finding and diagnosing the issue in a complex situation.

In order to reduce what is changing at any given time, I took your upgraded repo and ran a build, then downgraded Nuxt to v3.5.3 and Nitro to v2.4.1 and ran it again. The sizes were almost identical, though actually the newer public/ directory was smaller:

Note that the size is affected by:

1. there are three copies of every file as nitro.compressPublicAssets produces both .gz + .bz versions in addition to the main asset
2. you are also generating server sourcemaps

However, I cannot reproduce any change from the Nuxt update. So it must be one of the other changes in the project. As I suggested above, it would be worth trying to update them (or downgrade them) one by one until you find the culprit.

If at any point you discover something that looks like Nuxt might be at fault, please do not hesitate to let me know - ideally with a minimal reproduction so I can confirm it's a Nuxt issue.